ASHRAE BACnet standard aims for better building automation

ASHRAE recently made changes to its newly published BACnet standard, which the association said will encourage smart lighting controls and other building automation controls systems.

ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 135-2012, “BACnet – A Data Communication Protocol for Building Automation and Control Networks,” was developed to allow building equipment and systems manufactured by different companies to work together.

Officials with the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers said the new standard is being published ahead of schedule due to the wide-reaching changes in alarming functionality made by addendum “af” to Standard 135-2010. This edition of the standard also includes recently adopted changes for the lighting industry.

Addendum af provides improvements to the alarm handling in BACnet including: improved fault handling, temporary alarm recipient subscriptions, improvements in scalability of alarm distribution, and simplifications in alarm distribution to support less complex products, according to Carl Neilson, chair of the Standard 135 committee.

“For building owners/integrators these changes allow improvements in interoperability between lighting control products and other building automation systems,” he said. “Hopefully, this facilitates more deployment and integration of smart lighting controls, such as lights that turn on/off when occupants enter/leave rooms; lights that come on based on the same schedules as climate control; and opportunities to reduce lighting based on energy usage during demand/response events. With the changes in alarming, we also hope to see alarming support in ‘smaller’ devices, which should provide more alarm and fault detection with a lower engineering cost.”

All together, addendum af contains 32 parts. For information on the changes or to order of copy of the standard, visit www.ashrae.org/bookstore.